The Circle Game

by Tanya Nichols

  He didn’t look at her as she climbed into the old Ford. He pressed hard on the gas before the door closed, and the sudden force knocked her sideways, smashing her upper arm into the dash as she protected the baby’s head. She gave him a hard look, “Are you happy now?”

  “Shut that kid up.”

  “She’s hungry and wet. You didn’t give me a chance to feed her.” She held the baby close and tried to stifle the screams with her aching breasts, rocking in the seat while she dug her right hand in the diaper bag, searching desperately for a bottle. Her fingers wrapped around the half empty one she had fed her a few hours ago as they drove fast down Highway 165. They had gone out for a ride, just trying out his new clutch, she thought. She picked up the bottle and shook it. It was warm, and probably old and sour, but she gave it to the baby anyway, rubbing the edge of the nipple along the bottom lip that quivered and shook with raspy cries, forgetting the bottle was laced with Jack Daniels. Juicy had no choice but to make her sleep through her mama’s nightmare, and Jack was all she had. The little mouth grabbed the nipple and instantly sucked hard on the rubber tip, the cries quickly shifting to grunts of pleasure as her empty belly was satisfied.

  “There you go,” her mother whispered. “See, it’s okay.” She held her daughter close to her breast and patted her wet bottom, her diaper soaked through and leaking out the rubber pants to the legs of her soft cotton sleeper, patterned with little lambs grinning and leaping puffs of white across a field of blue and yellow daisies. “Oh, you’re all wet,” she moaned to herself, “poor thing, poor wet baby girl. Gin Gin Ginny Girl, gorgeous little Ginny Girl,” she sang, her own lullaby.

  While the baby sucked on the bottle, her mother began to unsnap the sleeper, slipping one arm out, then the other, pulling it down and off. The truck jerked and rattled and Juicy struggled to change and feed the baby simultaneously, but she knew better than to complain. Not now.

  They rode in silence, Freddie smoking and driving fast down dark roads, streaming past orchards and vineyards, rolling through stop signs without stopping, sometimes without even slowing down. She didn’t know what time it was, but knew it would be light soon. The earth had the shimmer and glow of predawn, the light beginning from the ground up, pushing the darkness out into the atmosphere. Just hours earlier, when Freddie had lured her out to the trailer behind Fat Betty’s, it had been twilight, the first stars shining in a violet sky, a humming of night noises rising from the orchard where crickets, mice, and opossum scurried about, searching for food. By the time the roar of engines drowned out the buzz of hungry bugs and rodents, it was pitch black.

  The voices, bodies, odors, and tastes of the night flashed through her mind, turning her stomach over and over, sickening her. As they drove the unfamiliar roads, somewhere near Porterville, she thought, or maybe Visalia, she began to wonder how she got there, how her life had turned to this. When she left her parents’ home, a little more than a year before, she was so sure of where she was going, what she wanted. But she didn’t know anything anymore, where to go, what to do. Finally, she spoke. “You’ll never see me again. I mean it.”

  “Good.” Freddie pressed harder on the gas.

  “You’re an evil bastard.”

  “You know what you are? You’re a whore. You’re nothing.”

  “Fuck you. I’m the mother of your baby—I’m . . .”

  In one swift motion, Freddie slammed on the brakes and threw the back of his hand up and into Juicy’s face, knocking her head to the side window. The bottle was yanked from the baby’s mouth and flew across the cab as the truck slid sideways on the road. The baby screamed while her father grabbed a handful of her mother’s hair and pulled her head back, leaning his face close to hers, his breath the familiar sour smell she knew too well. “You’re lucky you didn’t find yourself at the bottom of the fucking lake instead of just flat on your back.” He gave her head a small shake. “You’re a fuckin’ thief.” He shoved her head away, then smacked the side of her face with the back of his hand.

  “I paid the rent, asshole, with the money you gave me. Your rent,” she sobbed, moving as far away from him as she could, holding the baby close to her chest, trying to smother the screams with her body. “You’re the one who stole it, or did you forget that part? What would Nasty Dan and the guys think of that?”

  “All you had to do was get laid, Juicy, the only thing you know how to do,” he screamed. “And shut her up, God damn it.” He threw the truck into gear and, with a squeal of tires and spray of dirt, he sped down the two-lane road, furious.

  Ginny’s screaming was relentless and loud. No matter how her mother rocked and patted her, crying her own tears, the baby wouldn’t stop crying. Freddie ranted and raged, his stream of curses filling the cab of the truck until he finally pulled over hard to the side of the road. He reached across her and opened the passenger door. “Get out.”

  “Just take me home and then I’ll leave.”

  “Get the fuck out now.” He threw the truck in park, leaned back against his door, and pulled his right leg up and around. She was falling from the truck before she even realized that he had kicked her, the baby falling with her, under her, screaming, the bag flying.

  “Freddie. Don’t,” she screamed, scrambling to her knees, but all Juicy heard was the rev of his engine as he raced off down the highway, leaving her and a crying baby alone in the dark.

  Ginny’s cries were louder, she noticed, a sound she had never heard before, piercing through the night. Face down in the dirt, wearing only a dirty diaper and one half of a sleeper, the infant’s arm was bent behind her. Wrong, all wrong, her mother thought. On hands and knees, she picked her up. The baby screamed in pain, intense pain.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, weeping and moaning. “I’m so sorry.” She strained to see, blinded by darkness, dirt and tears. She searched for the bottle, the bag, clawing at the ground until her fingers felt the canvas strap, then the round plastic bottle of formula. She struggled to her feet and lifted the screaming baby, covered in dirt and urine and held her tight to her chest, careful not to grab the arm that seemed deformed. She hung the bag around her neck and started running down the highway, her own body aching and throbbing with every awkward, painful step. “Help,” she coughed, her voice hoarse and choked with sobs. “Help me. My baby’s hurt.”

  The porch light was on, the house still dark. She pounded on the door until it opened, a man and his wife standing together, worried at the commotion on their doorstep waking them from their last seconds of sleep. They pulled the girl and her baby inside.

  “What happened? Where did you come from? Who are you?” They wrapped the baby in a towel, helped the woman into the backseat of their Rambler station wagon. In less than five minutes, they were driving, the man behind the wheel, his wife beside him, and behind them sat the beaten woman, dirty, her face marred with smeared blood, holding the baby with the raspy cry, her little voice nearly gone from strain.

  The sun was beginning to creep over the horizon as they reached the hospital. Juicy saw the ambulance in the parking lot, the glass double doors, then inside everything was blue and green and the baby was gone, behind a curtain, down a hallway, through two big swinging doors. Suddenly, everything was quiet.

  Seven

  2005

  Like most Saturdays, it was nearly noon and Bernie still sat in her backyard with a mug of hot coffee and the morning paper, struggling with an eight-letter word for broth that fit with the boxes of letters she’d already completed in ink. A pound of red seedless grapes was nearly gone as she picked and nibbled away, doing anything to keep her mind off of Joan Bennett and who or what her birth mother might be and why she would finally decide to look for her after all this time.

  It was easy for a day to slip away in the backyard retreat her grandmother had created over the years. Noni had turned the yard into an artist’s paradise. Star Jasmine covered the fences and filled the air with a rummy sweetness. The rhythm of a three-tiered fountain
flowing constantly offered an illusion of a mountain brook hiding in the beds of day lilies and petunias in their final stages of bloom. Reds, pinks, purples, yellows, white, and every shade of green filled the yard, but it wouldn’t be long before everything would turn to amber with the falling leaves of the sycamores and mulberry trees. Bernie loved to sit on the deck and breathe in all the fragrances, letting the stress of Noni’s health, lawyers, clients, expenses, and now birth mothers dissipate with each breath. It wouldn’t be long before the cold weather would arrive and days of lingering in the backyard would end until spring brought a new wealth of sunshine.

  Despite what Bernie told her grandmother the night before, she had already clipped one article from the front page of The Bee. The story that caught her eye that morning was about a big fire in the Sequoias, no murder, no suicide. The woman who started the fire was about to be sentenced and wrote a letter to the judge, a last-ditch appeal for some sympathy, an explanation as to why she would do such a horrible thing for apparently no reason at all. She wrote, “You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live a clean, decent, honest life. You could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you’d stick to it. And then out of nowhere, some catastrophe comes into your life and turns everything upside down and inside out forever.” That’s it, she thought. This woman gets it. She’s sitting in jail, probably will be sitting there for a long time, and now she’s learned that in one day, with one act, your whole world can cave in around you and everything changes forever.

  Bernie had clipped the piece and hurried off to her bedroom. From under the bed, she pulled out the clear plastic storage box and popped open the lid. It was nearly filled with old newspaper clippings and magazine articles, some more than twenty years old, the paper faded to a tawny yellow. She gently laid the new story on top, then pressed down on the mound of newspaper print, smashing together years of death and sadness into one firm pile, snapped the lid shut, and shoved it back under the bed where it would stay until another headline would send her in search of scissors.

  The crossword puzzle was more of a challenge than Bernie wanted, so she left it unsolved and moved on to the easier word Jumble. The words were too easy: biscuit, jargon, drudge, and private. As she solved the final puzzle with the word “driver,” she decided to get up and make the drive out to Madera to see if there was any paperwork left by the Lunas. She needed to put this case together quickly. Not only was mediation less than ninety days away, she needed to do something for the little boy across the border. Sixty minutes later, she was driving slowly down Orange Avenue, searching for number 6245.

  The street was lined with shabby, wood-framed houses: nearly identical boxes of chipped and peeling paint surrounded by patches of withered grass, tired and dying from weeks without rain. An occasional magnolia tree grew near the road, and at some time one or two of the homeowners had apparently attempted to do some landscaping; an occasional scraggly rose bush or overgrown hydrangea hugging the sides of those houses, but most of the yards were ignored and neglected plots of dry ground. She drove, hoping someone would be home. Hoping she would find what she was looking for.

  A small boy, his hair buzzed off for the summer, played alone in front of the small house. He kicked a soccer ball back and forth between his bare feet, dribbling the ball across the yard, two skinny legs jutting out of a pair of navy blue shorts that hung to his knees, occasionally kicking the ball into a camellia growing next to the front door, scoring a goal, brown petals fluttering to the ground. Bernie parked across the street, away from any stray kicks that might find their way to the side of her car.

  “Hey there,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “Do you live here?”

  He kicked and jogged, casting a sly look up to her, but not stopping until he plowed the ball hard into the straggling bushes and raised his arms in a sign of victory. Score one for the little kid against the dying bush, she thought. “Hola,” she said, trying Spanish on her second attempt. “Este su casa?” She pointed to the house, smiled big, and nodded vigorously. Her Spanish wasn’t very good, and she suddenly realized she should have brought an interpreter along. “Este su madre at, uhh, el casa?”

  He stopped and picked up his ball and gave her a toothless grin. “She’s home.”

  “Oh good. You speak English. My Spanish is . . .” She exaggerated a big grin, pulling her lips back tight, and gave a shake of her head instead of finishing her sentence. When he laughed at her funny face, she reached her hand out to him. “My name’s Bernie. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Moochie.” He squinted into the sun and rubbed his palm back and forth across the top of his head, like he wasn’t sure his hair was really gone yet, then stuck his hand out to greet her.

  “Well, nice to meet you, Moochie.” She gave his small hand one firm shake and let it drop. “How old are you, Moochie?”

  “I’m six now,” he said proudly. “I used to be five, but now I’m six.”

  “Wow, you must have just had a birthday then.”

  “Yeah. Last week.” He hopped up and down and side to side, a flurry of constant motion.

  “Did you have a party?”

  “Yeah, my mom took us to the McDonalds and we could sit on the grass and see the fair. There was a big ride way up in the air.”

  “Did you go on it?”

  “No, we just sat on the grass at McDonalds and looked at it. It was cool. People were screaming; they was so scared.” His smile broadened at the memory and he laughed, his head tilted back, shaking side to side while looking up at the sky. “We didn’t get to go in the fair. It costs a lot of money, but we got to see it.”

  “So, your mom’s here?” She tried to keep up with his movement, constantly shuffling to keep his hopping body in view.

  “Uh huh. I’ll get her.” He leaped up three steps, bent forward and peered through the dark screen door, cupping his hands around his eyes. “Mama, a lady is here.”

  From inside, a lively thrill of happy accordions, trumpets, and guitars bounced out to the porch where they ricocheted into soft harmonies before fading into quiet. A woman’s voice yelled something in Spanish, a smaller voice shouting back, but Bernie couldn’t understand any of it. They spoke too fast for her to understand. Finally, Angelica appeared, her dark hair pulled into a high ponytail, so tight her eyes seem to slant upward, exotic and painful. She wore cut off denim shorts, the button and zipper undone to make room for a growing belly, a new baby inside waiting to be born. A bright orange tank top stretched tight across her middle and the shorts showed off her fit legs, legs that didn’t seem to go with the top half of her. “Oh, hello,” she said, her broad face breaking into a wide grin. “You’re the lady lawyer. I remember you. I go to your place that time, remember?”

  “Yes. I was hoping you would remember me.” She had only met Luis and Angelica Corona once before, when they came to her office with Carlos, just before he was sent to his grandmother in Mexico. The Coronas were the ones that called her after the accident. They got her name from Pedro Garcia, a former client happy with the quick settlement she’d gotten for him from a fall at the grocery store. The manager on duty had helped him out the door and to his car, not bothering to make a report of the fall, not bothering to call an ambulance, not bothering to offer him anything, ignoring the man’s painful limp as he stumbled out the door on a fractured ankle, suggesting he see a doctor when he got back to Mexico. No one wanted to take that bout of egregious racism to court, so it was settled quickly. Pedro told them to call Miss Sheridan, a white lady lawyer. She would know what to do.

  Just days after the tragic accident, they walked into her office, Carlos still speechless and hardly breathing or moving with the fear and pain that swallowed him with the news that his mommy and daddy were gone forever, a paralysis that Bernie recognized. Of course, she would take this case, she told them. She would do anything for the dark-haired child who clung
to Angelica Corona’s skirt, never letting go. He seemed fragile and helpless, sitting at the conference table like a lifeless mannequin, his eyes dark and open wide, watching for the next punch his short life could expect. Bernie wouldn’t hesitate to represent Carlos, if his guardian agreed. Carlos’s pain was palpable.

  “Is Carlos back yet?” Angie asked, her voice sliding up a scale, the last word an octave higher than the first, her English sounding musical as if she learned it from the pop songs on the radio.

  “No. I’m not sure when he’s actually coming back, but I think he’s doing pretty well with his grandmother. I’ll know more soon. I’ll be going down there to see them.”

  “Oh yeah?” she sang. “I don’t go back, but I hear they coming here soon.”

  “Who told you that?” Bernie knew information flowed across the border with family members and friends brave enough to make the trip home to their family left behind in Mexico, only to return in a few weeks’ time for the new picking season.

  “My friend’s cousin went down there. He said he saw Carlos and Señora Luna, and they say they coming here pretty soon.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, but like I said, I’m planning a trip there to see them. Perhaps the message got confused.” Bernie pointed to Angelica’s stomach. “When’s your baby due?”

  “In December. I’m hoping December 12. In Mexico, down there, it is special to have a baby born on that day and you name her Guadalupe. It’s the Day of Guadalupe.”

  “What if it’s a boy?”

  “Same. Guadalupe is boy or girl.” She lightly rubbed the palm of her hand around her protruding belly, already petting her unborn child.

  “Well, you’re going to have your hands full. Three kids.” Bernie spread her own empty hands outward, palms to the sky.

  “My mother will be here, I think. And my husband, he will be back. We’ll be fine. It will be good.”

  At least this mother will take care of her baby, Bernie thought, not hand her off for someone else to raise. Bernie’s pleasantries and patience were quickly fading; suddenly all she wanted was to get moving, to get what she came for and head home. “Well, the reason I came by was I was wondering if you maybe found any paperwork that Mr. and Mrs. Luna might have left behind. Receipts, really. Do you remember I asked you to keep anything you found?”